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The Controlling Parents Survey (CPS), a 16-item scale, was developed to measure the influence of perceived parental control on personal development in college students. Data from 3 studies involving 362 undergraduates contributed to the construction of the CPS. We also examined the relationship of the CPS to locus of control, hope, optimism, and enmeshment, finding significant positive correlations with enmeshment and external locus of control, as well as significant negative correlations with hope and optimism.
A sense of personal control is essential to our identity, effectiveness, relationships, health, and well-being (Shapiro & Astin, 1998; Shap- iro, Schwartz & Astin, 1996). Yet over the last 2 decades, there has been a disturbing decrease in personal control among American college students (Twenge, Zhang, & Im, 2004) along with a dramatic increase in stress, anxiety, depression (American College Health Associ- ation, 2008; Davey, Yücel, & Allen, 2008; Lewinsohn, Rohde, Seeley, & Fischer, 1993; Michael, Huelsman, Gerard, Gilligan, & Gus- tafson, 2006; Twenge, 2000), binge drinking (Collins & Carey, 2007), lower academic achievement, the inability to make important decisions, and emotional dependence on their parents (National Survey of Student Engage- ment, 2007).
This period has also witnessed an increase in parental intrusiveness and overprotection of college students (Levine, 2006; Montgomery, 2010). We hypothesize that these students' decrease in personal control and associated problems are related, at least in part, to increased controlling behavior by their par- ents. However, despite important work on the effects of psychologically controlling parents on children and adolescents (Barber, Xia, Olsen, McNeely, & Bose, 2012) as well as growing concern about the effects of intrusive parenting on college students (Carton & Nowicki, 1994; Hofer, Yu, & Pintrich, 1998; Levine, 2006; Montgomery, 2010), research is currently limited by the absence of a quantita- tive measure of controlling parenting for the college population. The Controlling Parents Survey (CPS) was designed with these consid- erations in mind. Here we describe the devel- opment of the CPS, provide preliminary data on the CPS scale, and examine its correlation with mental health variables such as locus of control (LOC), enmeshment, hope, and opti- mism.
THE CONTEXT: PERSONAL CONTROL AND HEALTHY EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Twenge et al. (2004) found that many of today's college students believe their lives are controlled by...